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12 December 2012

Whats new in MS Office 2013 ?

At first glance, Office 2013 doesn't look much different than Office 2010. The layout of the apps is a bit cleaner, and on a tablet, most items are spaced well enough that the app is easily navigated by fingertip. Still, familiar touches remain. For instance, the ribbon of menu options introduced in Microsoft Office 2007 was rumored to be on the way out, but it's still alive and kicking in Office 2013. And, at least in the preview apps Microsoft supplied us, it's not hidden by default.

Does Office 2013 feel right at home on a Windows 8 tablet or did Microsoft simply shoehorn old Windows PC software onto a tablet?

Word 2013
Launch Word 2013 and you'll be greeted with a two-pane start screen,
which contains some Metro design elements. On the left is a list of your
recent documents and on the larger right pane are large tiles of the
various templates. Select a template and Word opens. On the preview
application we've been using, we were greeted by the large ribbon of
menu options, which was expanded by default. You can collapse it by
clicking or tapping on the small upward arrow on the very right edge of
the ribbon. (If you hide the ribbon and close Word, it will remain
hidden when you reopen Word.)

A new menu item has been added to the seven that carry over from Word
2010. In addition to Home, Insert, Reference, Page Layout, References,
Mailings, Review, and View, you also get Design. The Design tab lets you
select different document themes, page colors, borders, and watermarks.
Word is also more flexible with images and graphics. It features a
Live Layout view. With it, you can drag images, charts, and other
graphics around on the page, and text flows and wraps around it. The
Format menu tab appears when you add a graphic. It has alignment guides,
which help you line up graphics and offer various layouts wrapping text
around your graphics.
Two new menu items are listed under the insert tab: Online Pictures
and Online Videos. This duo saves you the step of having to save an
image or video from Facebook, Flickr, YouTube or another online source
to your computer or tablet first before embedding in a document. And
Word lets you view embedded videos instead of simply adding a
placeholder graphic. Word can also edit PDFs now, which is a huge time
saver.

Read Mode, available from the View tab, removes the distraction of
all of the menu items, giving you a full screen view of your document.
It is particularly welcomed when working on a small tablet. Read Mode
still gives you some tools; you can highlight text and add comments. And
with comments, you can now reply to another's comment, and you can mark
comments as done, which grays them out.
When you save a document, you can save it to your computer, to your
SkyDrive, or to SharePoint (if your office has a subscription). And
perhaps as a nod to its embrace of cloud computing, SkyDrive is listed
above Computer on the Save As screen. You can share documents on social
networks, including Facebook and LinkedIn, and you can send invites to
people for documents stored in your SkyDrive account. If you share a
document with someone who does not own Word, they will still be able to
view it by opening it in their browser.